On occasion, I hear the sales team of a major software vendor make a claim that a competing open source software (OSS) product is created by amateurs.  Sometimes they even go as far as saying “they couldn’t code their way out of a wet paper bag!”  I’m not sure what sense that makes because this type of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is only an attempt to hide their frustration of one fact – OSS is winning.  It wins because it is lower cost and of equal or greater quality.

If we step back for a moment, who creates OSS?  Is it:

• College students doing course work?

• Seasoned IT professionals who see an unmet need in the industry or are frustrated with a vendor?

• Developers with some spare time and a passion to create?  Is it computer scientists exploring a new concept?

• Companies who used professionals to create a product and decided to release it as OSS?

You probably already guessed that it is all of these and more.  People create OSS for a variety of reasons.

The quality of what they create is judged by the world.  If any OSS component is of poor quality, one of two things happen.  The community may say, “let me help” and they improve the software.  Or the community says “sorry, nice try, but we aren’t interested.”  Sometimes that means someone else creates a better component. Other times, it means the idea dies, leaving the software author as the only one who cares about it.  With OSS, it is ultimately the community that decides if the component is quality or not.  Popular OSS receives exactly the same type of development and testing attention that a commercial product receives.  In fact, many of the commercial products have adopted development practices and testing tools from the open source community.

So, when someone tells you that OSS is created by amateurs, you now know why they are criticizing this software.  Whatever their company is producing, they are seeing competition from something beyond their control – OSS.  Use this to your advantage!

There are ways that you can harness the power of OSS, either through adopting a process that helps you responsibly use OSS or gives you the power to compete with the 800 lbs gorilla.

—Jeff Brown, SilverStream Consulting